Diablo 3 Gameplay Systems and Crusader Panel Slides

Posted By: November 9, 2013

The Diablo 3 Gameplay Systems and Crusader panel was held earlier today and much was revealed receiving a good reception from the crowd. Our report from Flux is incoming but in the meantime here are key slides from the presentation showing off some of the new skills and examples of loot 2.0 changes.

There is much to be excited about. First few stills are here the other 70 are after the break.

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Armour Sets for the Crusader

Did you watch the panel? On a scale of 1 to 10 how hopeful are you that what you saw today is going to make the game a lot more enjoyable for you. Also, do you think this will bring a lot of the community back to Sanctuary?

Keep an eye on the BlizzCon Coverage Section for the full transcripts (not bullet point lists) of the Diablo 3 Panels, videos, hands-on reports, photos, screenshots and more.

No, that’s wrong. I mean, the primary secondary thing makes it easier to get trifecta on items now… or something.

Here’s a quote:

>One other change to help with Less is More is talked about a lot of the stats, and changed them up. They are doing Stat Grouping: Primary and Secondary stats. Primary stats are things that directly increase your power, and Secondary stats are other effects that do things for your character. So stats are broken out; stats like Bonus Experience and Magic Find don’t take the place of Critical Hit and other direct power stats.

So they didn’t fix the item basics, but at least sorted down randomization of affixes a bit. Don’t see that encouraging longterm replayability, though. A basic loot fix would have been necessary for that…

Don’t forget that those stats are capped now, so yes, you want them, but only to a certain level. If you have one item that almost hits those caps for you, then you can make more interesting choices on the rest of your slots. I think that’s one of the right ways to go about it.

Yes, that’s true. But a recent data mine showed that those text strings had been removed… which I’ve figured to mean they were gone, but really, it could mean any number of things. Hope Flux asks my question about them!

seems like they’re going with huge stats instead of huge crit and ias and such. hard caps or not on the affixes, attributes aren’t capped and 7000 is bigger than 3000. though it really makes gem bonuses seem pointlessly small…

That’s actually a really good idea, especially since you can twink gems down to low-level characters, since there’s no required level. Currently, handing down a bunch of Radiant Stars or Marquises breaks early game in half, even if played on MP 10. A percentage gain (say 1% per gem level, for 15% in Marquise) makes the bonus less noticeable in the early levels (making the game less broken) and much more noticeable in the late levels, making gems really important. Awesome idea!

Legendary and set are the new endgame, aha. RIP any chance of rares being useful whatsoever.

This speaks a clear language. Rare items should be the core itemization, while legendaries should build upon them, break several rules, expand the bascis and add interesting stuff. Never it should have been the goal to make legendaries mandatory for ALL slots (remember JW? “there are no best items. best is to have a mixture of each item types).

Good rares are an indicator of how good the itemization is. There are no good rares in Diablo 3 now.

From a gameplay perspective, I suppose it makes some sense for lower level items to be desirable. However, for me at least, it just seems so wrong for lower level items to be more powerful or desirable than legendaries. Think about it: a rare item is a magical item that is particularly powerful, but that could still be made by pretty much anyone. If we think in-universe, an average magical blacksmith might create mostly magic items, with a 1/100 rate of creating especially good magical items. A legendary item, on the other hand, is an item that is so powerful that it has shaped the history of Sanctuary. These are weapons and armors that have killed and sealed archdemons (Maximus), been wielded by Angelic generals against the forces of Hell (Azurewrath, which was originally the fallen angel Izual’s blade), and have just generally been so incredible as to have inspired legends about their greatness (thus them being called legendaries). Comparatively, even if for gameplay reasons it would be nice to have lower-tier items be desirable, I don’t think it makes any kind of real sense, and so I can’t really feel bad that it isn’t happening.

Also, I feel that finding a legendary has a lot more oomph, in terms of personal satisfaction, than finding a rare, even a really good rare. I started playing Path of Exile last week, and I’ve found 4 uniques so far. One of them has been really good, and the other three have been kind of meh. However, the feeling of seeing the unique drop has always been a strong, intense kind of pride that a really rare item dropped; comparatively, even though many of the rares I’ve found are far more powerful than the uniques I’ve found, it just doesn’t have the same oomph. I see (on average) hundreds of rare drops per unique drop, so rares don’t really feel incredible or impressive to me, even if the stats are stronger than the ones on my uniques. Because of this, and my feelings above, I’m not really disappointed that D3’s endgame is going to be legendaries.

Remember the rare and crafted items showoff thread here on incgamers? I wonder why there were no unique items showoff threads hmhmmm… could it be that in rares and crafted Diablo 2 could show its brilliance with loot randomization while uniques always had the same base rolls with slight differences?

Not a single mention about ladder. I dont think they r thinking about this for RoS, maybe sometime after the launch. Im sad.
Anyway, Im still hyped about the changes on the skills that were most op, the breaking resource regen combos. And hyped too about the effects that the new legendary effects will have on the build variety.

After having watched this pannel on the Blizzcond presentation, I am more certain than ever that this game is heading in the right direction, and that is the direction of Diablo 2.

People can bitch all they way about rares not being good enough, not having that purpose of being BiS in at least one slot and all that, but the fact of the matter is, that they didn’t really do that at any point after D2C was over, aka when LoD was launched.

By showing us clearly that they are making legendaries accessible, with a theme and a pupose (of changing and enabling builds), and even more importantly, making the ranges on the boni a lot tighter, and thus eliminating the fact that nowdays, we need to get extremely lucky to find a valuable legendary base item, and then win the lottery again on good affixes, then do it all over again and get good rolls on those affixes…. all this contribues to me believing that they’ve finally GOTTEN IT!

That’s orange text indicates special properties that are unique to that legendary item, or at least only appear on legendaries.

I liked that the gray numbers showing the potential range of affixes is so newly-added that it’s only in the Frostburns slide. Shows how dev goes; even the screens for the powerpoint are already out of date. (That gray text was not showing on legs found in the RoS demo. NYI.)

So I suppose Frost Burns could be used on any class that has a frost skill or weapon with cold damage? So a barbarian with whirl wind that has a cold damage weapon could have a 50% chance to freeze enemies while whirl winding would be pretty cool imo.

The paladin was my first class in d2, zon to follow. The fact that they are tied to them. Seeing the old hammer revisited and added to the crusader… My monk now has a rival for a favorite class character. Also transmog I adore it in wow I am a fervent mogaholic. Now that i can have a specific look for all of my toons in d3… Much fun will be had.